living room interior sketch

what's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is minh from architecture inspirations. today i'm going to show you how to render a living room on a winter evening. in this video, i'll walk you through my design process, materials, lighting setup, as well as some post production process in photoshop. also, if this video hits 200 likes, i'll give away this model for free. with that said, let's get started. first, let's sketch out the scene that i have in mind. since it's christmas season, i'm planning to do a rendering of a christmas-y living room. there will be a coffee table, a sofa, and some chairs in the foreground.

while the background will have a fireplace as our focal point, also, let's not forget about the christmas tree. the two main walls look pretty plain right now so i will add some windows on both sides of the fireplace, as well as a double sliding glass door behind the couch. for this rendering, i don't want any sunlight that comes from the windows and doors. but rather, i will try to use the fireplace and a pendant to light up the room. finally, i will add some pillows, curtains, and other decorations to complete the scene. with that in mind, i can now go to the 3dwarehouse and pick out my objects. here is what i have so far, we're still missing the fireplace and the table.

for the table, i found a great one from this website, and for the fireplace, i actually modeled it from some inspirations i found houzz.com now i can apply materials to these objects using the built-in materials library or other textures i found online. i won't be showing you how i apply materials for every object because that would take forever but i'll show you some awesome tips that you can use. 1. replace skp material with vray material to do that, first use this tool to sample the paint that you want to change. then pull up the list and scroll to that material. now right click it and click select objects in scene.

this will select all the geometries with that material. now pick a material on the list that you want to use, right click it and click apply material to selection. and there you go. 2. replace sketchup texture sometimes 3d warehouse has really awesome objects but the textures are pretty..crappy. if that's the case, then you can use this method to easily replace the textures. first, use this tool to sample the paint, now on the materials windows, click the edit tab and use this button here to load a different texture in place of the original one.

there you go, now you can change the size of it here if needed. in addition, you can customize it even more using this button here. just click on it, and open it with photoshop. now you can customize this file and resave it as whatever you want. once done, just reload it using this button here if the material doesn't look right, adjust the texture again in photoshop, resave it, and reload it again until it's right. and that's the gist of it, now i can use these methods to apply materials to all of the objects. sometimes i like to make some minor tweaks to the 3d object itself to make it more unique.

like this christmas tree here, the tree topper doesn't look that great once it's rendered. i'm going to make it look more like this instead. first i'm going to trace over one point of the star. now i can use this plugin called tube along path to draw tubes along each of these lines. once one part of star is done, i can make it a component and array it radially along the center like so using the rotate tool and press ctrl to make a duplicate. then type "x7" to array it 7 times. there you go, that looks awesome!

now i'm going to apply an emissive material to make it glow. and now that we have all of our objects ready, let's set up the scene. first, let's start with the room. the room will be approximately 15' wide by 18' deep and a ceiling height of 8 feet. the fire place will be in the very center of this wall. i will bump this part of the wall out about 6" and place the fireplace in the center like so. i'll also add some wall trims to make the room look a little more decorated. you can easily do this by using some objects on 3dwarehouse and the follow me tool. now let's place in some 3'x5' windows with 2-foot sill height in the center of each side of the fireplace.

the sliding doors will be approximately 12' wide by 7' tall and it will be centered on this wall. let's apply a wood material to the floor and also put in a rug where the furniture will sit on. now we can add the table in the center with the chairs on the left side and sofa on the right. i also took a pillow off one of the chairs to make it less repetitive now let's add a light pendant that's approximately 5' 6" off the ground and align it with the table. then let's dress up these doors and windows with some curtains and shades. i'm pretty sure you notice this huge blank space above the fireplace, so let's add some candles and a piece of art here. the table is a little empty so i added the macbook that i used from this video.

oh, let's not forget about these. it's not christmas without presents! now for the lighting like i've mentioned before, since this is an evening rendering and i don't want any direct sunlight. i'm going to turn off the sun altogether by setting the intensity multiplier to 0. now i will add a sphere light inside the fireplace with the intensity of 350. and also i'm going to uncheck the affect reflections so that the sphere won't show up in the reflections. now i'm going to add a rectangle light with the intensity of 10. but it won't represent a physical light so i will make it invisible and turn off the affect reflections and specular as well.

now let's test it out. hm that looks good, but, if you notice, in most pictures with fireplaces, the scene seems to have a dark red or orange tint to it. i want to create that effect, so i will add a brown color to the sphere light. this make the objects reflect a little of that color and simulate an environment around a fireplace. now to add the orange tint, i can just add an orange color to the rectangle light like so. and there you go, looks pretty good! but before i render, i like to add a couple of render elements

in case i need them for my post production process. i often use several of them, including materialid, reflections, refractions, etc. but there's one that's new to vray 3.4 which you should consider using. it's the denoiserchannel. just go to the custom render channels rollout, click on add channel, and select denoiser channel. this will help you get rid of any noise in your rendering and make it look a lot better when it's close-up. now i can set my output size here and i like to render it at the same aspect ratio as my sketchup viewport

so i use this button here to get the same aspect ratio. now i can set my quality here and start the render. when the render is finished, remember to save the channels as png and let's do some photoshopping! first i'll import my denoiser image as my base. since it's a png, these parts are transparent so i can easily add the background in like so. this is actually not one large single image but rather 3 copies of the same one, i just adjust them in a way to make it look consistent. for the fireplace, i imported a stock image and crop it out using layer mask.

i usually import lines from sketchup and overlay it over the rendering like so to make the edges more prominent. to do that first go to your sketchup model, and set the style to hidden line, and hide the objects that you don't want to have lines. now go to style and make sure your profiles are set as 1, and that your background color is completely white. then export it as a jpg and import into photoshop. now place it on top and set the blend mode to multiply. now add a layer mask and use a brush to paint black on the mask to hide the lines that you don't want to show.

the christmas tree lights is looking pretty blah. i'm going to use a lens flare to make it better. just download one and import it to photoshop, now set the blend mode to screen, you can then clean it with the eraser tool and scale it to fit the light. now you can duplicate this for all of the lights by holding down alt and dragging the layer using the move tool like so. once that's done, you can select all the layers and put them in a group. it's looking too consistent so i'm going to turn down the opacity of some of these layers.

i'll also add a gradient to make it less repetitive. just create the gradient and set it as overlay. i want to overlay gradient on the lights so i'll clip it to the group by holding down alt and left click it. that look too intense but i can reduce the opacity here. actually, i think i'll use this gradient again for the whole image too. let's duplicate it by holding down alt and dragging the layer. now i can set the opacity here. since they are separate layers i can have different intensity for each of them. to make it more interesting, i'm going to overlay a bokeh effect,

i can adjust the opacity here but i still don't like how you can see each circle so i will apply a blur effect to make it less intense. that's better! now i'm going to select the top visible layer and press ctrl+alt+shift e. this will merge all of these layers into a new layer. then i can make the final edits using levels and brightness adjustment layers. and that is the final product. i hope you guys like the video.

make sure you smash the like button because i will give away this model for free if this video hits 200 likes. that's all for today guys, what kind of rendering should i do next? let me know in the comment section below. don't forget to subscribe, we're almost at 2 thousands, so let's keep going! anyway, stay inspired guys. and i will see you,

next time!

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